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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are giving you a breakdown of Stargate, the latest AI initiative, and, really, like, a massive, just completely tech and AI focused story to come out of the post Trump inauguration. I I think the the mainstream
Speaker 2:news was like
Speaker 1:not on this. And I was very happy to see, like, okay, there's a tech story here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Caught off guard. Yep. And opening out like what was interesting is it came out at like I was in I was on a layover, off brand. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was I was on a layover last night. Roasted. Because I was flying into a small regional airport. And, just routine maintenance on the G6. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, it just was poorly, poorly planned. But, I just remember it was 4 PM in Denver when the story came out, which just felt super random. Typically, you have a big announcement like this.
Speaker 1:It's like more
Speaker 2:but it was because they were doing a press conference with Sam, with with, with Trump.
Speaker 1:The photo is in
Speaker 2:The photo of them altogether.
Speaker 1:And Trump's just standing outside. Just being like, nice guys. Like, yeah, Do some American business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like I like the vibe of this because I don't think you and we'll get into this, but the the like, Trump is not committing money to this. He was just like, this is cool. Putting a stamp on it. Yes. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's gonna stand on it. That's great. Yeah. And and and Massa had very much framed it as before he you know, apparently, the conversation went, if you get if you win, I'll bring you a $100,000,000,000. Yep.
Speaker 2:And Masa was saying, like, I came back with 500. Well, that was. And so you can't keep a good man down. Yeah. Like, there's some really iconic Masa pictures throughout history.
Speaker 2:It's go on our our acts or or the TV account. In my account, I tried to surface some yesterday. We got some bangers up. We got some bangers. We got a 8 k banger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As as of this recording, might be a 10 k now. Well, let's go through the Wall Street Journal article to give some basic facts, and then we'll, cover the the some Ben Thompson analysis with the information or the misinformation is saying about it. And then, we'll take it through the timeline and get you some reactions to Stargate, the new AI initiative. So the Wall Street Journal writes, some of the world's most prominent names in technology are pledging to pour as much as a half a $1,000,000,000,000 into building.
Speaker 1:It's so much
Speaker 2:Sounds it sounds bigger when
Speaker 1:you say half a trillion.
Speaker 2:It's been so normalized Yeah. The b word.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And now it now it's half a trillion. Now we're in the t t land. Artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US and the latest high profile initiative timed with the start of the Trump administration.
Speaker 1:Is and this is what's weird. It's really interesting. It's it's a joint venture. It's a new company. And so OpenAI is taking equity in Stargate, and they're the leader of this joint venture.
Speaker 2:You wonder how the dilution you have to take as a new company raising racing that much money. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I have a trade.
Speaker 2:And and and what they say here that intends to invest $500,000,000,000 Yep. To be clear that they can obviously have a huge debt component to that Yep. Which would still count as this framing of an investment. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, we'll get into this, but, I mean, the there's been a massive disconnect between, like, the announced, like, in our day, back in our day, when you announced the $20,000,000 round, it meant that $20,000,000 to the cent came into your balance sheet as an equity investment. Yes.
Speaker 2:And so the framing here is
Speaker 1:And the investors would even have to, you know, you get the you get the wire instructions. It's like, oh, you're investing 5,000,000, invest 4.9999996 because you're buying this many shares. And now it's like, yeah, I threw some Venture debt on top of it and then some cloud credits and then, oh, yeah. This government told me that they might throw some extra money in if I do one thing. So I'll throw that in there and all of a sudden I add a couple zeros to my fundraising around.
Speaker 2:Yes. As long as I'm and, back in my day, if you went out to raise 7,000,000,000,000, you came back with 500,000,000,000,000, that was not something to be self ignorant.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. The start is at 7,000,000,000,000. That was the story.
Speaker 2:I forgot about that. That's wild. Those rounds typically don't even get announced. Yeah. You try to
Speaker 1:do that. So so it's, OpenAI SoftBank Group, which we know well. They'll build data centers for OpenAI, and then OpenAI will be a customer of those data centers. So it's gonna be this complicated, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Loopback. The database company and MGX, an investor backed by the United Arab Emirates, are also equity partners in the venture. The company is committing a 100,000,000,000 to the venture with plans to invest up to 500,000,000,000 over the next 4 years, which actually seems
Speaker 2:to be perspective. In 2024, I believe there was a $168,000,000,000 invested into US based, startups. Yeah. And so this is basically saying we are going to match almost match that level of spend, but purely into the data center infrastructure side, the, you know, energy.
Speaker 1:Everything just gets so it's it's essentially we're seeing, like, the vertical integration of AI where where, you know, like, it used to be, Oh, yeah. Like, you wanna build a startup. You're just, like, you're essentially, like, an AWS wrapper than a chat GB wrapper. Yeah. Then it came to the training runs.
Speaker 1:You're gonna have a huge AWS bill because you're gonna be training on some infrastructure. Now it's like, in order to to to really do what they wanna do, they have to buy the land, the energy, the the the compute. Everyone was saying, oh, another 1,000,000,000,000 to NVIDIA because NVIDIA is gonna make
Speaker 2:Well, that's what I was just seeing. I was, you know, obviously, shitposting the, like, you know, showing Masa and,
Speaker 1:oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, Jensen being like, 500,000,000,000? Did I hear that right, Masa? He's like, yes, brother. It's all for you.
Speaker 1:It's all
Speaker 2:for you. And it's funny because Masa literally bottom text Nvidia. Do you remember? Like, he sold
Speaker 1:it so low. Right? Yeah. I saw at the bottom.
Speaker 2:And his it it would have, like, you know, so anyways, this is just yeah. I mean, the the whole story of Masa, I was I tagged Ashley Vance, and I was like, you need to do an a a proper documentary on Masa because what an incredible story. The guy has had some of the biggest wins and the biggest else. It just, like, continues to, like, push forward, never loses, never loses confidence seemingly Yep. Which we love to see.
Speaker 1:So the $100,000,000,000 sum includes projects that the companies already announced and initiated under the Biden administration. So they're kind of, like, rolling in their old progress as well. So, like, muting it as the thing. And the total figure, if realized, would be large even by Silicon Valley standards and underscores the extent to which tech companies and government officials are betting on AI as the future of the American economy. It also shows how much tech executives want to broadcast their enthusiasm at the start of the new administration.
Speaker 1:And I love this photo of just Sam smiling while talking to the Paul brothers.
Speaker 2:It's like random photo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's like the the Wall Street Journal knows what they're doing there. They're just like, this this is this is, like, you know, unprecedented. And it's just like there's celebrities around, and they they pick that photo very clearly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One one thing you can tell as far back as Sam positioning is I'm gonna raise $7,000,000,000,000. Yeah. Sam is under such an I don't think there's somebody. Elon's under a lot of pressure and that he's got a lot of balls.
Speaker 2:He's juggling. Right? He's got, like, 7 balls in the air. Yep. He's got 1,000,000,000, you know, 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars on the line.
Speaker 2:But Sam is arguably under much more pressure, much more scrutiny. And so seemingly this project, they very clearly are 500,000,000,000 building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. So Sam's strategy is his number one enemy is the most powerful, wealthiest man in the world Yep. That everybody's saying, oh, great. We're now an all our key oligarchy run by some some guy from South Africa.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? But Sam's strategy is, like, I'm gonna become too big to fail.
Speaker 1:True. I also think this is an interesting narrative violation about that that thesis that has been running wild, that Elon secretly the president, and, like, has a 100% control over Trump. Because if if that really was the case, then this press conference never would have happened. Right? And so it actually is kind of refreshing in some ways to see that, no, the, like, the presidency is still clearly intact, and Trump is just
Speaker 2:making
Speaker 1:deals one of the time.
Speaker 2:We talked about this right before the show. Sam Altman was very against the Trump presidency. Oh, yeah. He he he he praised Reid Hoffman in 2021 saying, you know, if it wasn't for Reid, Trump would be ours. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So so this this is an exam you know, you framed it as, Trump is a deal guy. Yep. He's he's playing the specific moment. Yep. And so he he clearly in this situation would have known that Sam had been a critic and Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Wasn't for him, but still was like, this is, you know, good for America. Yeah. Let's Yeah. Like, do this. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is his stamp on
Speaker 1:it? He's come around on on this. He's he's donated. He's come to the inauguration. He's effectively kissed the ring, and so I'm down to do deal as long as the deal makes sense.
Speaker 2:Ends the ring.
Speaker 1:And in this case, it's it's just inter on deal terms, it's it's the federal government doesn't need to invest anything But get and gets a huge benefit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dominance over It
Speaker 2:would actually be weird. It would be.
Speaker 1:And a lot of this is investment from other countries into America. I mean, that's what NASA represents. Right? And that's what the, the the, MDX, MGX, the UAE. So you're taking money from a foreign country and putting it in America.
Speaker 1:That's, like, that's a pretty easy calculation
Speaker 2:for Trump, I think. And yeah. For there's there's a good argument for foreign investment here because I don't think the United States has 500 bill you know, if they can pull the money together. It's not like we have an extra $500,000,000,000 that are just kind of you'd really have to
Speaker 1:Like, we print that, like, every day.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. I think that's true.
Speaker 2:Not every day, but I I get what you're saying.
Speaker 1:But yeah. And I'm like, I mean, what? The the COVID stimulus was, like, a trillion and another trillion or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So yeah. So we could. But if we did that, it would be very and stuff. Yeah. Well, it would be correct for it to go all to okay.
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're doing a stimulus check for Sam Altman. It's 1 $1,500,000,000,000 check. Yeah. This is universal basic.
Speaker 1:It comes through economy today.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The economy today just functions as a wealth transfer between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and base Barron. Base Barron picking up a very small Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Out of that.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:I I was laughing at this because, you know, over the weekend, the, the Trump coin launched and then Melania coin launched. And everyone's like, it's so ridiculous that these, like, super powerful people have, like, coins attached to them. But then I was thinking back on it, and I was like, wait. But, like, remember when Elon attached himself to Dogecoin and you could basically get exposure to Elon through Dogecoin? And he essentially had a, like, a, you know, a meme coin attached to him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and then even Sam has Worldcoin, which doesn't truly have, like, cash flows yet. And although there's, like, more of a story there for how that's going to be a real crypto, it is in some ways a meme coin just about Sam. Like like, when I think about, do I wanna buy World coin? It's do I do I think Sam is gonna be a successful person?
Speaker 2:It's a way to go. It's a way to go. It's a
Speaker 1:way to go. Sam and Sam. Individually. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Because the the coin should, like, live and die by him in the same way that Trump coin lives and dies by Trump. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very odd, like, framing. So Stargate's 1st data center will be in Texas.
Speaker 1:The site which started construction last year will be operated by Oracle and used by OpenAI. The companies didn't disclose how much each partner would contribute. OpenAI raised 1,000,000,000 of dollars, but still loses money. Oracle has about $11,000,000,000 in cash and marketable securities, but more in debt. And SoftBank has roughly 30,000,000,000 of cash on hand.
Speaker 1:OpenAI said it would operate the venture while SoftBank will will finance it. Stargate will have a separate board of directors and hire a new CEO, which sounds like just like after all the war drama at OpenAI, I'm like, just I have PTSD about AI boards generally. But SoftBank's, Maceo Susson will be chairman. Stargate plans to bring on additional equity investors. So, I I I think Ben Thompson framed it as, like, this is almost more of, like, a prospectus or a roadshow for Stargate.
Speaker 1:It's, like, kicking off It's a marketing event. It's a marketing event. It's, like, kicking off
Speaker 2:It's a general solicitation.
Speaker 1:At the White House.
Speaker 2:To the to yeah. Yeah. To the sovereigns, basically.
Speaker 1:Basically. Basically.
Speaker 2:But and it's and to be honest, like, it's very smart to be, like, go and get a photo opportunity with Donald Trump being, like, yes. We want 500,000,000,000 invested in American AI infrastructure. Yep. And then if you're the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, you're like, oh, we'll toss, like, 5,000,000,000 in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean gonna be a party round. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is very clearly a party round. Seriously. I mean, the the the the other way to think about this is, like, it is this huge number, but how do you comp it just to general tech capex? And so Goldman Sachs has estimated that, all the American tech giants collectively will spend an estimated 1,000,000,000,000 on capital expenditures in the next few years. And so that will include large outlays on data centers, chips, and power and the power grid.
Speaker 1:And so there's already kind of a $1,000,000,000,000 flowing around. This is a question of, like, if you're if you're Jeff Bezos, do you wanna be a part of this party round and, like, kind of count your capital expenses?
Speaker 2:Or yeah. Yeah. And and later we'll we'll maybe get to this or maybe now the right time is, so Elon obviously quickly came out and said Yeah.
Speaker 1:Will you pull up that post?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Elon came out and he goes, they don't actually have the money. And, and then had had had a number of other posts. And it's clear to everyone, involved that they certainly don't have 20% of the 500,000,000,000 just sitting in an account. Like, there's that money has clearly not been committed.
Speaker 2:You know, wired. Right. Maybe there's it seems like there's a lot of soft commits. There's people around the table saying, yeah, we wanna be involved. Yep.
Speaker 2:But it's so it's so it's so clearly like a deck and a render. Yes. Exactly. Nobody's gonna be like and then it will be a bunch of sub entities and complicated structures of, like, okay, we're setting up this data center. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're gonna tie this much debt to it. Yeah. We need $10,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:It's just see fake it and then at this level.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fake it till you make Basically And so Sam Sam's strategy, which was interesting, where he says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are one of the most the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And I don't think that that response, I think he's trying to win out like it it you can I I do believe he genuinely believes that? Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally. How could I
Speaker 1:mean, you go back and watch the interview between him and
Speaker 2:But Like fighting fighting fire with a hug. I don't think it's how you win against you're not gonna you're not gonna, you're not gonna win the war with Elon by being nice to him.
Speaker 1:I'm really excited. So many different ways. But Elon, it's kind of just like, why not just try a new strategy, I guess? But yeah. I mean, it's interesting because it's like the initial OpenAI announcement.
Speaker 1:I think it's it is this fake fake it till you make it energy. Most people understood that, but I think Elon realizes that many people don't, and many people will think, oh, wow. Oh, yeah. I have 5,000,000,000 and they have 500,000,000,000. I should have done
Speaker 2:This has 60 almost 60 definitely over 60,000 likes by now. Yep. And, I guarantee you that OpenAI has people seeing this post, messaging them, and being like, hey. Will you promote my crypto coin? You know?
Speaker 2:So, like, it's so, like, the average person seeing this is like, wow. This is real.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Totally. Because you don't understand all the
Speaker 2:nuances of the when you see an announcement like this, it was done historically. Yeah. And it's being done in the present.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so Elon Elon is he's not I mean, he he's he's almost, like, theatrically just trying to educate people on, like, the nature of this fake it till you make it stuff, which sometimes he does too. And then Sam's
Speaker 2:the optimist demo. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And so there's a little bit of, like, everyone's doing the fake
Speaker 2:it till
Speaker 1:you make it, but there's a lot of alpha and, like, calling somebody else out for doing it and who's Yeah. And And and getting that dialing in the level of fake it till you make it is, like, the the most important thing in Silicon Valley because you go too far and you're in jail.
Speaker 2:And every every every You
Speaker 1:don't get far enough. Founders
Speaker 2:do this with product demos. Right? They'll they'll put out a cool video launch video showing it. Yep. And then you sign up for the product and it's got not not not really feature.
Speaker 1:Oh, I mean, even Google.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Google, when they launched their AI stuff, they were saying, oh, yeah, they sped up the like the AI was actually thinking for 3 minutes. They sped that up and they didn't say they sped it up. And like all these different things, like a million companies have gotten caught with doing stuff like this, faking. So but it's different when when Tesla fakes a demo and it's like, oh, like they, you know, they they delivered that product like, 3 days late or 3 years late
Speaker 2:in Tesla North Passive
Speaker 1:versus, like, the, the Nikola guy who, like, straight up had a free truck that was rolling down. Exactly. And that was fraud. So the line of, like, what is fraud and
Speaker 2:Well, and that's somebody's doing that to get to, like, sustain their aggressive, you know, market cap. Right? Their their marketing. Yep. So, Janek, our buddy Janek from from public.com sent us, sent us this post, which was clearly Satya running cover for Sam after all this.
Speaker 2:And on CNBC, he gets asked, you know, Elon Musk says, like, project Stargate doesn't have the money. Now, obviously, Satya's conflicted here as any you know, you ideally, peep you'd be over your career. You become so conflicted that, you know, you just can't say anything, at all. But, and, so Satya gets asked this question very directly. Satya owns half of OpenAI and, like, is made a huge huge bet on OpenAI.
Speaker 2:And Satya is very sort of, like, specific with his words. He's getting pressed on, do they do they actually have the money? Yeah. And Sachi goes, you know, we've we know we've committed to investing, you know, $80,000,000,000 a year, in Azure. And, you know, and the guy go asks, like, a follow-up question, And he goes Satya goes again, all I know is I'm good for my 80,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:And, like, Satya is not saying I'm investing $80,000,000,000 just through Stargate. He's saying I'm investing $80,000,000,000 in my Yep. Data centers and infrastructure and on all this stuff. And so I mean, again, this is one of those things that that that, normies, not our audience, but Yeah. Normies will look at this and be like, oh, Microsoft is investing 80,000,000,000 in this.
Speaker 2:Like, they're they're 80% of the way there. Yeah. Like, it's real.
Speaker 1:I mean, if that was the case, that would be extreme if their balance sheet just went down by 80,000,000,000 into some high risk. No.
Speaker 2:I mean, they have they have they have commit I mean, to be honest, the the other thing here is it's not high risk in the set in the way that investing in a startup is. Right? You're investing in physical infrastructure that has somewhat predictable demand. Yeah. Everybody's expecting exponential growth in that demand, but Yeah.
Speaker 2:Every indicator says that that's correct. So, and again, Microsoft is using a bunch of debt. Yep. Everybody involved will be, like, levering up, which we love to see. We love to see.
Speaker 2:It'll be interesting actually to see if there ends up being if if the if AI creates so much demand that we are just constantly trying to catch up to that demand, or we create a, like, a new housing crisis because, like, 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars are invested in data centers and Yeah. You know, who who knows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is, like, it's it feels like so much money, but at the same time, when you when you talk to the AI folks and they're like, every order of magnitude is what gets us, you know, breakthroughs in AI. We went from GPT 4, which was a $500,000,000 run to a $5,000,000,000 project to the 50,000,000,000 coming and the 500,000,000,000. Like, 4 years is actually slow on the on some people's AGI timelines. Like, some people wanna do an order of magnitude basically every single year.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, like, the the That's been talking about for a long time.
Speaker 2:To be honest, like It's
Speaker 1:like I I I basically, it's like, I I don't exactly know how the capital formation will happen, but if you if you just ask me, like, will humanity invest half a $1,000,000,000,000 in AI over the next 4 years? I'd be like, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Bell Thompson. One one
Speaker 2:one last thing I would say. OpenAI, I think, is the best in the world at, at disseminating their story and the things that they want people to believe through a complicated network of terminally online and on accounts. Internal employees, leaks, you know, stuff like that. Memes even being like, oh, we're going to name it Stargate, which is like a very charged name for Stargate was a TV show. CIA project.
Speaker 2:Oh, is that control. Oh, okay. One reference. There's also a sci fi reference. There's a sci fi reference.
Speaker 2:If there's a movie called Stargate. Like, there's all these different things.
Speaker 1:It's a cool name.
Speaker 2:It's a very cool name. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Whoever held that, a couple days ago, they they they
Speaker 2:print it.
Speaker 1:They probably sold it for $50,000,000. Yeah. So, yeah, Ben Thompson frames this as a bit of a prospectus as Masayoshi Son sets out to raise the funds. A project of this size and magnitude does seem to be up his alley. What is amusing is OpenAI's propensity to get itself once again into a weird financial arrangement.
Speaker 1:It seems as if the company will get Equity and Stargate, a separate company from for operating the data centers, and it will also be its primary customer, which is to say it will be paying itself in some respects. Still, it makes sense. OpenAI is a software company with different long term cost structure than that of an infrastructure company. That's fine if you're at Microsoft scale and profitability. But for entities that are losing money and looking to raise more, it makes sense to be different investment vehicles.
Speaker 1:So, Steve, like, in one way, the market can look at OpenAI as a software company and then Stargate as a infrastructure and hardware company, which which which which does make sense.
Speaker 2:Project. The Manhattan Project of AI Yeah. Is cool because you're getting some of that credit of it being this government thing when all Trump did was say, yeah. This is a cool vibe. I'll I'll give it I'll join your press conference.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should go to the, the Baker?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gavin Baker. Okay. So Gavin Baker, crossover crossover fund manager and a great poster says, Stargate is a great name, but the 500,000,000,000 is a ridiculous number, and no one should take it seriously unless SoftBank is going to sell all of their BABA and ARM. SoftBank has 38,000,000,000 in cash, a 148,000,000,000 in debt, and generates 3,000,000,000 in free cash flow per BBG.
Speaker 2:What is the I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh, probably Bloomberg.
Speaker 2:Oh, per Bloomberg. Okay. I thought they were saying like per yeah. So 3,000,000,000 in free cash flow. They own 143,000,000,000 in arm and 18,000,000,000 in Baba.
Speaker 2:If they start selling ARM, their stake will be worth much less very quickly. So if you basically just start if you sell off 143,000,000,000 in stock, it's gonna, you know, create a supply demand issue. Oracle has 11,000,000,000 in cash, 88,000,000,000 in debt, and generates 10,000,000,000 in free cash flow. That's a lot of money. It's it's, you know, it's funny to put a founder at the helm.
Speaker 2:Founder at the helm, and he's looking good. Everybody's wondering what's his stack, HGH test, you know, face lifts. He's looking good.
Speaker 1:He's looking good.
Speaker 2:OpenAI is burning cash. MGX did not commit to a number and is a $100,000,000,000 fund. Maybe 10% of the fund goes into the best case in the best case. NVIDIA will limit how much they invest in any one model company, maybe 5,000,000,000 barring the aforementioned
Speaker 1:soft model company. So but any and it is, like, the most, like, virtuous cycle or whatever money they put in is gonna get to the end. So I I I could actually see the Nvidia investment being higher.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But yeah. Barring the aforementioned SoftBank. Oh, and they can also structure it as, like, trading in in kind trade of equity for
Speaker 1:For GPUs. Product. And then also that 10% of that fund, I think that that's a little weird. It might be a little low. I think some funds could go up to 20 or 30%.
Speaker 2:A private equity fund will do Yep. 5 concentrated. It's possible concentrated.
Speaker 1:And then, also, if they if this deal goes well and they're, you know, and they're raising the next fund, like like, the the the commitment is over 4 years.
Speaker 2:And so,
Speaker 1:you know, the the
Speaker 2:So potentially.
Speaker 1:Like, that that one fund is MGX or MDX? MGX. MGX. So far They could wind up getting 50,000,000,000 of experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Also, this doesn't take into account positioning this as a road a roadshow. Perspectives.
Speaker 2:And Masa is known to make ridiculous commitments and then walk them back a little bit. So he could be like, I will sell all my arm to, like, make this happen. Exactly. I've got the cash. Like, let's let's run it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, so anyways, barring the aforementioned soft bank arm sale might be able to put together 50,000,000,000 in equity funding over several, several years can obviously finance the G the GPU's input debt on the JV. In this case, you could probably, if you're gonna put up 50,000,000,000 of equity, I don't know how much debt, you could slap onto this bad boy, but Gavin's point is nowhere close to 500,000,000,000. Everyone should just start issuing press leases press releases for $1,000,000,000,000 AI projects. And then apparently some biotech company with the ticker MGX, like, popped
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:After this, like, 30%. Yeah. But, but, anyways and so
Speaker 1:The people buying the wrong ticker thing and actually moving the market always blows my mind. Yeah. So, yeah, like, how do you like, you're enough of a you're enough of you're enough of a trader to read this news and think that it's bullish for the fund. Go in there, but not check. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But what if 2 seconds. What if you're investing in the right thing?
Speaker 2:Okay. But what if it's just that The bot. There's this understanding that
Speaker 1:it will pop.
Speaker 2:It will pop. Oh, okay. So you're like, meme.
Speaker 1:It's the meme stock. It's the Trump coin of
Speaker 2:meme pop. Of this. And so Jeff Lewis referencing Sam's response to Elon, he says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring crossover fund manager involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI of all time. And then they just go into this, like, back and forth, Chad on Chad violence. Violence.
Speaker 2:And, but but, anyway, so so Gavin is conflicted. Jeff's a huge investor in OpenAI. He's conflicted. Everybody's it's everybody involved in this public conversation is is deeply conflicted, but that's why we're here to, you know, try to figure out what's actually happening.
Speaker 1:So there's an interesting to go back to the Satya Nadella and Microsoft thing. Like, obviously, Microsoft and OpenAI have been really, really closely aligned for a long time, and then that there's been reports of that relationship fraying a little bit. And Ben Thompson has a good breakdown of kinda like how this wound up happening. And so he, he previously wrote in an update saying, my so Microsoft will spend money on training, but at a pace dictated by inference usage. Leaving aside the fact that inference usage only comes after training, this is a viewpoint that is fundamentally at odds with OpenAI's still stated goal of pursuing AGI, which is in some respects just doing training for training's sake to see what you can develop.
Speaker 1:I guess you could square these circles if you tried, but it sure seems like OpenAI and Microsoft are really, dare I say, misaligned. He's joking, about the alignment problem. But but it is interesting. There's evidence that evidence of this misalignment continued to emerge. The information wrote about OpenAI's frustration with Microsoft's GPU availability and the role that played in OpenAI's last fundraise in October.
Speaker 1:The Financial Times reported in December that Microsoft was negotiating to remove the AGI clause that restricted their future access to OpenAI models in exchange for further investment. Then over Christmas break, the information reported that the companies were having difficulty coming to a new agreement. The the the 2 companies were having difficulties. Reported? You said Yeah.
Speaker 1:The information. Misinformation. Misinformation. Although Microsoft was more insulated from the AGI clause than believed as opening I needed to first generate $100,000,000,000 in profits, To that end, it is notable that this new deal does not appear to have more investment from Microsoft as you as you noted Yep. And does not appear to address the AGI clause.
Speaker 1:And so there so so a a little bit of this is, like, maybe a way to get back into, like, the crazy scaled up training runs that just have been maybe a little bit stalled because you you kinda max out Azure. And it becomes this question of, like, hey. We have this belief that scaling laws will hold, and that if we invest 10 times the money, we will get a higher IQ model out. And there and and it's it's pretty clear from the we looked at the data, and it's pretty clear that when when you when you 10 x the energy and tokens and data and and all the all the all the work on the training, you do get a smarter model, but the increases have been diminishing. So as you spend 10 times more, it you don't get the same increase from GPT 3 to GPT 4.
Speaker 1:So you could see this diminishing curve. And at some point, you know, if it doesn't become just superintelligence, you're gonna wind up doing the training around the costs 500,000,000,000 and only getting like, oh, cool. It's like it went from, like, an okay PhD student to, like, a pretty good one. And it's like, is was that really worth it? And so I think that OpenAI clearly believes that, yes, it's worth it.
Speaker 1:We're gonna get something really special out of it. It's gonna drive Yeah. An immense amount of value on the inference side financially and also potentially, like, solve all of human humanity's problems and all that stuff. But Yeah. But but but making that case to Microsoft, which have shareholders and tons of other businesses to say, hey.
Speaker 1:You need to take every penny you have and start building data centers for us probably wasn't going
Speaker 2:One one thing that, it seems very clear, it's impossible to predict the future. Right?
Speaker 1:So you're it's a it's a skill issue usually, but
Speaker 2:Yeah. Skill issue. For some people. Skill issue. Not not The thing I can predict is that humanity, a 100 years from now, will study this power struggle over over the creation of non human intelligence.
Speaker 2:Right? And the funny thing I I, I saw somebody post and they said, everybody's now calling it ASI because it's clear we have artificial general intelligence
Speaker 1:already. Totally.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. And so even open AI is like everybody's like, hey, we gotta kinda unwind this, like, AGI clause in this partnership because, like, kind of already have it. Yeah. It's not printing, like, $100,000,000,000 a year in free cash flow.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, like, maybe it will someday. Yeah. Maybe a bunch of companies eat up that pie.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's just so much money on the line. It's, like, actually incredible.
Speaker 1:Because you can just do everything. Like, it's every single industry.
Speaker 2:Tim Cook's punching the air because he's, like, barely scraping the gears. 78,000,000 in total comp. Meanwhile, the average baseball player is making, like, half of that. And and he's sitting watching this piece of
Speaker 1:ice ball.
Speaker 2:He's sitting watching around. He's he's watching, you know, these size lords huck around 1,000,000,000 10 Tens of 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars checks. So he's like, I can't even I can barely get a a bite. A crumb. A crumb.
Speaker 2:It's funny, like, where is Apple in all of this?
Speaker 1:It is crazy. Partner with OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they're sitting on all this cash and they're just like, yeah, let's rip another buyback. Yeah. I think yeah. I I So uninspired.
Speaker 1:I think that, like, we're we're so stuck in all the all the nuances of the story because it's so big and so interesting. But I think it's gonna be incredibly interesting to see what Elon's reaction is gonna be because he's definitely
Speaker 2:gonna have to outrace.
Speaker 1:He's he's gonna have to do something. Well, in here Even if it's just PR or, like, narrative spinning or storytelling, like Yeah. There's gonna be something that comes from Elon World and XAI that is compelling and fascinating. And then Google too.
Speaker 2:Think of the other sovereigns that are not in this announcement. Yeah. Qatar, Saudi. There's plenty of other big sovereigns, right, that can write $20,000,000,000 checks. Yep.
Speaker 2:And so behind the scenes, you have to imagine that Malaysia. Malaysia does Lithuania. You talked about that. You have to imagine that there's this battle between Elon and Sam and Masa out behind the scenes Yep. Taking these meetings Yep.
Speaker 2:Trying to get people to pick a side. And those people don't actually wanna pick a side. Right? Like, even VCs don't wanna pick a side. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We wanna be able to be like, well, we invested in this foundation model, but, you know, they they they've got, like, sort of different paths, and we're also gonna do this one. Because people just wanna deploy and and they're playing you everyone wants to own a piece of ASI. Right? Yep. They they got their piece of AGI Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're kind of a little bit underwhelmed. Yep. It's cool. It's cool, but, like, you know Yeah. It's not solving all of our problems just yet.
Speaker 2:We still have to solve our own problems. Yeah. You still gotta prompt it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do I do really wonder. I mean, they keep like, the the pattern has certainly been or, like, the at least at least the financial story that we've been hearing is that, as a product, LLMs are sticky and drive high revenue subscriptions, essentially. Perplexity, $20 a month. Like, tons of people just pay for it.
Speaker 1:I I pay for it. It's great. But I also pay for chat gpt. And then I also just got the You
Speaker 2:use them interchangeably?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And interchangeably to some degree, certain ones are better for other ones. Like, the Google one has a really huge context window, so you can dump an entire book in there and then and then get it to summarize that. But, ChatGPT has better reasoning models with o one and soon, o three. And so, the latest news from OpenAI is that they're launching the o three model.
Speaker 1:It might be $200 a month. There's a version that might be $2,000 a month or something like that. There's been people talking about it. And then kind of quietly behind the scenes, people have been saying, well, you know, for a long time, people saw this as existential for Google because how are you gonna put ads in LLM responses if you read a big block of text? Are you like, it's it's less natural to put ads in, but perplexities solve that and figure it out how to put ads in there.
Speaker 1:And I think it actually makes a ton of sense to put ads in LLM responses, and it'll work just fine. And it's actually your Not
Speaker 2:all the way to purchase decisions.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And it's very easy to to actually just have a a second LLM that rewrites their response and says insert in that in this in this text response.
Speaker 2:They should consult with us on that.
Speaker 1:But the I think the third financial story that hasn't really been told yet is is is how are they going to drive cost down on the inference side? Because you saw this with Bitcoin where there were originally, it was extremely expensive to mine Bitcoin. You had to do it on CPUs, so huge server racks. Then they figured out how to do it on GPUs. Then they moved to something called FPGAs, which are kind of field programmable Gatorades, which are like, it's almost like a a baked in silicon.
Speaker 1:And then they went to ASICs, which are which are chips that are specifically designed just for mining Bitcoin. That's the only algorithm that the chip can run, and so it mines Bitcoin very, very efficiently. And that to my knowledge, no one has baked, you know, mid journey down to silicon or or GPT 4 down to silicon. Yeah. And when you do, the cost to actually inference the model should be nothing.
Speaker 1:And if and if there's some sort of curve where, yes, the true AI power users are gonna pay $200 a month for the really expensive model, and Sam recently said that o one users are actually losing the money because they prompted so much. And I noticed this. I use o one pro, and I get messages all the time, like, you have 5 prompts left. And I'm like, oh, god. Like, I'm probably, like
Speaker 2:Are they scoping you? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm probably, like, one of the people that they're losing money on. But for for, like, the average user who just wants something that's decent and is using
Speaker 2:the stream model. Why haven't they made truly the all you can eat buffet? If they one one reason would be if they actually made it an infinite one, then startups would hack it so that they would be like basically like leveraging one account to run structural software applications and just like piping it back. Maybe. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I mean, if there's people that that basically whatever their workload is, maybe just like, you know, recipes, shopping lists, just like daily life stuff, just, oh, spell check this thing. They're not really trying to do reasoning or advanced computation or math or code. Yeah. Then if they're if they're just happy with GPT 4, you bake that down in silicon, and then that's just pure profit. And I think that could drive, like, pretty great financials for some of these firms, but I just haven't seen anyone talk about that or actually build that model.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but I'm excited for that because I I think that'll I think that'll justify underwriting larger models, like, much easier because you'll be able to say, hey. All that revenue that that that that people are saying, like, oh, yeah. Because the inference cost, it's actually low margin revenue, all of a sudden people will be like, no. It's actually 99.999% profit when you break it down into silicon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Which would be the thing that really unlocks, like yeah. Of course, invest 505100,000,000,000 because once you once you get the model, that's perfect.
Speaker 2:And there's just so many
Speaker 1:The prints.
Speaker 2:It it, there's so many levels to the game. There's the hardware side. There's the model layer. Energy. There's the energy.
Speaker 2:Land. There's there's the time it takes Elon to get from the West Coast.
Speaker 1:The private jet industry.
Speaker 2:The Riyadh. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. A lot of private jet flights.
Speaker 2:But I I there should be an account that just tries to track you know, I don't you know, some of these players don't have their own jet, but, like, Elon Yeah. Is typically flying.
Speaker 1:Track that jet. That's bad. Remember?
Speaker 2:The well, there I'm saying there's a there's a whole subculture of tracking jets. And we would probably piece together who is actually making more fundraising traction with you by figuring
Speaker 1:out what you're saying. With the Intel thing where Qualcomm
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And a bunch of the of of, and, but I feel like that could Global Foundries, they're
Speaker 2:really knows.
Speaker 1:In Mar a Lago. Well, the announcement hasn't happened. It's probably it's probably Elon's imagine if Elon's Stargate is were buying Intel. Yeah. And and and Intel is going to Manufacture it again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Manufacture GPUs in America, and they're gonna be exclusively sold to XAI or something like that. Yep. And we're raising $501,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:All we gotta say to the audience, find your Stargate. Like, just find your Stargate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I've been feeling the, YC request for startups. Like, you know, they we've seen some some some success out there in startup world for people, you know, assembling, you know, half a $1,000,000,000,000 to build AI infrastructure. We'd love to see see that at once.
Speaker 2:More of these. Yeah. We'd like to see some more AI. It's
Speaker 1:a growing trend. Yeah. I'd like to see that too. So, yeah, let let let's close out with Ben Thompson here. He says, Oracle and SoftBank are there to serve OpenAI, which isn't a business that Microsoft is particularly interested in.
Speaker 1:Sure. Microsoft will provide inference to OpenAI for a fee, and they like having exclusive access to the API, but micro but Microsoft is ultimately a product and service Yeah.
Speaker 2:The IP.
Speaker 1:To, is it
Speaker 2:the API? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, but also the Yeah.
Speaker 1:Also the IP. Yeah. You're correct. If they can get away with running a highly efficient distilled model like DeepSeq demonstrated, this is what I was just mentioning. Like, DeepSeq distilled the model down so it's higher margin with a lower price to serve, then that's fine with Microsoft as long as their customers are happy.
Speaker 1:So Microsoft is gonna figure out how to slot the OpenAI API and the and the models into Excel, Word, Outlook, all their products, and then it's gonna be an it's gonna be Copilot on the desktop software. Everywhere there's a Microsoft product, there will be an OpenAI trained LLM running, improving that user experience, and it will be compressed. Yeah. Clippy.
Speaker 2:That'd be Clippy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They should bring back Clippy and make it, like, great, actually. It's like the smartest AI. It'd be great. And so they're gonna steal the model down and then just still have their normal margins.
Speaker 1:And so it won't be it won't be upheaval to their financial model because they're such a large corporation. They can't just be like, hey. Actually, we're in we're in the nuclear power business now. Yeah. Like, sorry, investors.
Speaker 1:Like, the entire model is completely different now. I don't think I I think what Ben Thompson is saying is that, like, Microsoft just isn't ready to completely pivot their model. They want their investors to know, okay. This is the profile. Yes.
Speaker 1:We're benefiting off of AI, but at the right, like, scale and margin. So OpenAI, meanwhile, remains not only committed to AGI and beyond, but is also in a fight to have the best model, which undergirds their status as a consumer tech company. They need training GPUs. They need GPUs to build products around inference time scaling. And most importantly, they need investors who are in it for the upside, not to serve enterprise customers who will take years to adapt.
Speaker 1:This new agreement and new announcement reflects this new reality and the end, at least in terms of relevance, of one of the most fascinating partnerships in tech history. They're really gonna write books about all this. It's it's insane. They're they're gonna talk about that.
Speaker 2:So do you think that do you think they did this because they were excited about Ashley Vance's new media company, Core Memory? Yeah. We were like, we need to give them a good first
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Story, throw them a bone. Yeah. Yeah. Because they clearly, you know, rushed it, Rushed the announcement.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's funny because it's a it's a very dangerous time to be trying to launch anything in tech. Yep. Because if you were
Speaker 1:Well, you might just get run over.
Speaker 2:You could get run over by a Stargate. You get run over by Or just Trump
Speaker 1:saying that wrong thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Think of Yeah. Think of yeah. Or or, a video where Barron Trump just gets increasingly larger and larger.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Anything like that. There was a good, like, SNL's cold open actually had, like, a pretty hilarious take on how Trump is able to just completely derail, like, the mainstream media because they're like, we really need to talk about this executive order, but we have some breaking news. Donald Trump just said he's gonna, you know, melt all of Greenland and turn it into a farm.
Speaker 1:And then so, like, they just get completely distracted consistently, and that's, like, extremely true. Like Yeah. Like like, no one can stay focused on anything. And so getting the launch right and timing the date correctly is, like, enormous. If you go on a date I remember when we launched the the the trailer for the show.
Speaker 1:I think it was a quiet news day, and we ripped. And it just destroyed everyone's timeline, which is great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tough day. I do.
Speaker 2:I remember I forget who it was. Some other startup that I I know did a launch when we launched the trailer, and I actually felt bad
Speaker 1:because I mean, during the fires, like, it was hard for us to break through because I
Speaker 2:just started posting about policy. They said you just went full I was on a warpath against I was
Speaker 1:like, you're saying in that Our whole our whole plan to not talk about politics lasted, like, 2 months. But to be fair Our audience is we if you track not based on the number of months, but the number of episodes, I bet you if you what what are we on? Episode 30 something? 36? I bet you episode 36 of All In is where they start getting political too.
Speaker 1:So, you know, we're actually just speaking. It's not political
Speaker 2:if you're just speaking the facts. Yeah. That's policy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:We only talk about
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The truth. We talk about policies, personalities. Exactly. But never politics.
Speaker 1:Never politics. Definitely. Let's just close out with, with Ben Thompson's final line. He says one additional point. If it's true that SoftBank is looking to raise debt for these data centers, then that's notable for a few reasons.
Speaker 1:On the positive side, it speaks to a great deal of confidence that OpenAI is really on the verge of a meaningful breakthrough, something like AI training AI all the way to AGI. That will that will consume $500,000,000,000 worth of data centers. On the more negative side, funding these data centers with debt as opposed to Microsoft funding data centers with profit is definitely a bubble indicator. OpenAI is right to go for it. Deep seek is evidence of the danger of standing still, but it will be interesting to see who wants to be in the business of loaning against rapidly depreciating GPUs.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. Venture debt venture debtors. Yep. The loan sharks always come out on top, I guess.
Speaker 2:They do. Did
Speaker 1:we get through all the posts related to this one?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We did. Okay. Cool.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the timeline. Oh, we got a whole bunch of woah. We got a whole bunch of DMs and reviews. Thank you so much to everyone who's been leaving reviews. If it's your first time hearing this call to action, we wanna remind you to go leave us a 5 star review, but specifically, leave a promoted post in your review.
Speaker 1:Write an ad for your company, your friend's company, just a company that you like. Just put it in the review, We'll print it out, and we'll read it on the show. So it's basically a free ad slot. What is that? $10,000 value?
Speaker 1:$50,000 value?
Speaker 2:Depending on
Speaker 1:I mean, it's it's a lot of value. So go do it. I'll read through these. This is a great podcast, says Stan Rizzo. I love the Technology Brothers podcast.
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Speaker 2:a little bit of an off bars. Peter, the CEO, sent sent us a few boxes. Yeah. John powered through.
Speaker 1:I yeah. So many of these.
Speaker 2:He's averaging 5 a day.
Speaker 1:You wanna take this one next? What little trade off you're eating this?
Speaker 2:Thank you for upgrading my information diet from Nick to Wilde. He says 5 stars. Very cool. He says if my podcast listening time was a luxury high rise, the technology brothers just swept in, took over the top 10 floors and evicted all the deadbeats. Sorry.
Speaker 2:All in. And if you're the kind of captain of industry who listens to the show, you know what lands you a luxury penthouse is a sales team that can close when big deals are on the line. Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that sellers. I just love that. Like, anybody anybody discovering the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Discovering the show and like looking at the reviews. This is like, wait. Like, why is all these? Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that their sellers can't close the hard way, cringing through recordings of blown deals and missed opportunities.
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Speaker 1:prepare their, to prepare their people for high stakes conversations, wanna see how they do it? Head over to exact.com and book a demo to experience our AI role plays firsthand. Thanks to the Technology Brothers for the ad read and for upgrading our information diet. Dude, this is haven't set a a word limit, and someone is just gonna drop, like, a 5,000 word pitch for their company, and we're gonna get stuck.
Speaker 2:I feel like Nick I
Speaker 1:think we're gonna cut it off. I want a screenshot from now on.
Speaker 2:Okay. 1,
Speaker 1:Tighten it up.
Speaker 2:I mean, insane domain. Insane domain. Insane domain.
Speaker 1:I'm ready to start, like, is that ready
Speaker 2:to start running these ads?
Speaker 1:They sold me. Yeah. Yeah. They sold me.
Speaker 2:And it's funny too because you have to imagine that exec.com is just generating the training data to replace the sales leaders that are using it. So it's like it's it's kind of wild. Anyways.
Speaker 1:Well, hopefully, they'll be duking it out on the 101, against all the other AISDR as soon as they as they Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're gonna have to deploy with all with Jeremy Gaffan for for billboard scares.
Speaker 1:Billboard scares.
Speaker 2:The one Adquick will get you sorted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A must a must listen for any brother. John and Jordy put the brothers in tech bros. They appreciate the finer things in life, prophets, Dom Perignon, and skiing. Their show is a must listen for any technology.
Speaker 1:Brother, this ad brought to you by this review brought to you by Carrot AI. Carrot is a whiteboard for researching, brainstorming, and thinking, and it's the best way to visually collaborate with AI. Carrot just moved into an open beta. Sign up now at carrotai.app. I haven't heard of this, carrotai.
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Speaker 1:So we hit the oh my god.
Speaker 2:Sir Sir Gord says yapping done right. 5 stars. Great podcast, but even better vehicles for ads. I've already bought David Protein bars and Bezos' old plane.
Speaker 1:Let's get it.
Speaker 2:Now I want my fellow technology brothers out there to hire me to make your pitch decks. Oh, this is Matt Gore. More than $2,000,000,000 raised from size lords like Andreessen Horowitz and the Saudi royals. Hit me up on x. Goracle of Delphi, that's goracleofdelphi, or check the company at osteo.
Speaker 2:I.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's awesome. He made a whole pitch deck for us when we launched, our our trailer, and it looked so much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Actually, yeah, I had many people
Speaker 1:being like, you just send it to him. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Many people were like, how did this leak or whatever? And and and so he and that was without we hadn't talked to him at all. So we just spun it up in the nowhere, and it was super unfair.
Speaker 1:Matt, if you're listening, please make a deck for Stargate. I wanna see that. Yes. I wanna see that deck. That's actually You said
Speaker 2:That's actually amazing.
Speaker 1:Superviral superviral potential. But he says he's raised more than 2,000,000,000. So if you make if he makes the deck for star Stargate and, you know, sends it to Masa and he starts shooting it around Yeah. You can 10 x that or a 100 x that number. Like, actually, like a 1000 x that number would be like $502,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:The only thing is that Masa is one of the greatest deckmakers.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I'm. Yeah. He does give Matt Gore a run for his money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Matt Gore has insane graphics. I'm like Yeah. Did you custom design this duck laying eggs? Golden eggs?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Imagine being a designer itself, and and just being like because it it has a very, like, PowerPoint aesthetic. It's it's not a Figma project.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not it's not refined or okay. So, 5 out of 5. Great to listen while shining shoes. I'm a professional shoe shiner, and Krogan has been my client for over a decade. I love listening to their podcast while shining shoes of celebrities and billionaires.
Speaker 1:Better than an MBA at HBS or GSB. For my son's birthday, he gifted him a Patek Philippe. Truly an exceptional mensch. This review is brought to you by Lucy. Pack a lip and and lock in.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Dude, you kinda need a you kinda need a shoeshine there.
Speaker 1:I do need it. I've been
Speaker 2:on the road. You've been on the road. I love it. Warrior.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Technology Brothers is my enlightenment. The Technology Brothers podcast isn't just another podcast. It's my enlightenment. I fall asleep to their voices, and by the time I wake up, their wisdom has already recalibrated my mindset.
Speaker 1:Prime for greatness before my feet touch my Brooks Brothers Loafers custom, by the way. The writing is so on point. It's so good. The world the world turns, but my orbit revolves around their takes. Technology Brothers is my gospel, my alarm clock, my North Star, enlightenment
Speaker 2:Wait. Who wrote this? Because Just
Speaker 1:take a wild
Speaker 2:guess. Oh, Baldo. You absolute legend. I was literally about to say, Baldo, we gotta we gotta hire whoever wrote this, but we're already talking with Baldo about about opportunities at the firm. So That's great.
Speaker 1:Let's go to this post. But I think so we printed this in black and white, and it's Chris saying no Brown in town, and he's and he's circling some shoes that I that they are
Speaker 2:brand new. Sam Sam Altman had it.
Speaker 1:Story here.
Speaker 2:So Sam Altman, he has an incredible taste in cars.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He's got the p one f one. Or the f yeah. The McLaren f one. Yeah. The McLaren f one.
Speaker 2:But he had a he had, and I'd say this to his face. He had a he had a horrific fit on, or I mean, it's just not on the level that it's not on the level that it should be.
Speaker 1:It doesn't scream half a trillionaire.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's no there's no excuses. I mean, there's I have stylists that we Fashion is back in tech.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And standing out is
Speaker 2:And loud opulence was really back this weekend.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. The inauguration. Yeah. You saw Lauren Lauren Sanchez with some very interesting No.
Speaker 2:It's fast. It wouldn't bucket that in loud opulence. I'd put that in
Speaker 1:Yeah. Glass. Something very loud. But I was disappointed that Bezos didn't match her energy and just rock the tightest tuxedo t shirt with his biceps just popping out and just been like, we're both, like, just going insane. Instead, he was just wearing a normal sister
Speaker 2:and missus.
Speaker 1:But I feel like if your if your fiance comes out dressed like that, you you gotta be like, what am I doing in this normal clothing? I gotta match the energy. Yeah. Come with something crazy. Speaking of fashion choices, we have some breaking news from Paul Baum.
Speaker 1:Trump assigns mandatory pocket protectors for engineers' executive order. I've never been a pocket protector, guys, completely before my time.
Speaker 2:I really Yeah. Yeah. We should we should take some for a spin just to see what it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do a little throwback episode where we dress up as NASA engineers. That'd be great.
Speaker 2:Need there needs to be, almost needs to be watch protectors with what's going on in
Speaker 1:the story. Oh, yeah. Do you wanna tell that story?
Speaker 2:This is a crazy one. Somewhat, yeah, not actually relevant to Paul's post. No. Yeah. Yesterday, somebody, held my brother-in-law, with up with a knife in the middle of the upper east side and stole his, Patek Philippe and, like, walked up to him, asked him for directions.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The guy was with his wife and children
Speaker 1:That's crazy.
Speaker 2:While committing this heinous crime. That's And
Speaker 1:then, like, the the criminal was with his his wife, not the victim.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The victim was alone. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is crazy. Is alone.
Speaker 1:Just be like, hold on, son. I'm gonna go steal something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So it's super dark. He was super shaken up, and he's like, yeah. Never wearing I'm never wearing a watch out in public again, like, unless I'm, like, getting in a car, going to dinner.
Speaker 1:I I yeah. I mean, it's it's like a super dark story, and it sounds like it's funny because we're talking about, like, we talk about We talk about very light terms all the time.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. We talked we talked with We reached out to a friendly journalist. Oh, yeah. And she was basically like, I talked to her crime scene. This is like such a common story.
Speaker 2:It's it's
Speaker 1:It's not an even story.
Speaker 2:It's not an even Oh, and the other crazy thing the cop said, the cop So my brother-in-law runs, like, finds a cop immediately after this happened, explains, like, what happened. He had a cut on his hand. Yeah. The cop said, sounds like your problem, not mine. To his face.
Speaker 2:And so now he's, like, trying to figure out how to get footage.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I really hope there's, like, a Pirate Wires article or something deep dive on, like, what's going on with the police because it feels like like is is this, like, the cops that they have or is this, like, part of it? Funded or they've been, like, hated on for years? Can you
Speaker 2:tell me the story of somebody whose whose baggage is stolen from LAX?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think that cops in some way have been so demoralized because the people that get caught for crimes are not prosecuted. Yep. But there's almost like this nationwide sense of I'm not gonna go through the hassle of doing this, that they're gonna be back on the street. And and it
Speaker 1:And then also and then also just, like like, for, like, the whole defund the police movement was, like, actually, it's more noble to not do your job if you're a police officer. Like, that was the message, like, the world was sending to police officers. It was like, you're not wanted, and that's really rough. Whereas, you know, like, the the the whole point with, like you read, like, a children's story about, like, the police. I'm sure you see this with your son.
Speaker 1:Like, it's like the police, firefighters, like, these are, like, heroes, you know, in the in the kids' story. Like, Paw Patrol. Like, the the the the main dog is a police officer, and it's, like, a good thing.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not,
Speaker 1:like, some bad thing. But, like, that that was just lost from our culture for, like, a few years. And I hope I hope there's, like, a a recalibration. And then there's probably some some something going on politically with funding, and then there's probably something else going on with, like, training and, like, the judicial system and all these other things. There's probably, like, a 1,000,000 problems that are going on that need to be addressed.
Speaker 1:But speaking of some good news on, watches, do we already talk about this in the show? I think we might have. But, congrats again to Tyler for getting a a Seiko. We love it. He's locked in.
Speaker 1:He got a sandwich.
Speaker 2:And to be clear, this week is a little chaotic for us. We are in New York from Monday morning to yesterday afternoon. We're back in Santa Barbara. There's now a new fire that's that's sent a ridiculous amount of smoke over here. So we'll see where we are tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Do do you wanna do this 1, Base Baron? Base Baron.
Speaker 2:Reference is Baron earlier, but
Speaker 1:I think you were talking about the real Baron.
Speaker 2:So and to be clear, Base Base Baron it was only it was like less than a month ago that I said investing in base Baron at sub 250 followers is like buying bitcoin in the nineties and he's now at like almost 3. And so this guy, Louis, goes, Rune got acquired by OpenAI. Beth got acquired by the blob. I don't what is that? What's the blob?
Speaker 1:I don't know. I yeah. Yasin
Speaker 2:got acquired by x. Yeah. Ain, an honest man left standing and beyond blah blah blah. And he gets, and then and then Base Barron quotes this and he says Base Barron got acquired by Tech Bros Pod. And Baldo goes, outsourcing political commentary since the pod avoids it.
Speaker 2:Smart. Base Barron loves to rip some Political post. Political post. You know? Great great poster.
Speaker 2:Bright future. Bright future.
Speaker 1:Let's go to, Adepai says, Quotrin Crumeo, who I saw this weekend. Great guy. He says, okay. Just to be clear, most of the EOs were written partially with chat GBT, and a lot of them were written with copy pasting between them. And then Real says, Arun says, Real?
Speaker 1:And Cermiou says, yes. And Eta Pi says, daddy, how did the AI take over? Did they send big scary Cylon robots? No, my child. Like, they like, we just use Chatroubitti by default to, like, write all of our laws, which is kind of funny.
Speaker 1:But it makes sense. Like, you need to write all these, like, papers. Like, of course, AI
Speaker 2:is gonna be giving some pretty big, you know, a lot of ammo to the high school kids that are writing every single essay. If you say, well, the president's using it to write his executive orders, why can't I, you know Yeah. Write use it to write about the founding fathers? Yeah. How does it you know, this is even less significant.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's it's still just like the the instantiation of the ideas, and so, you know, I don't know. It's, it seems fine. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I I'd be surprised if there's anything I'd be I'd be surprised if we if we wind up learning that that the the executive order is being written with with the help of Chat GPT wind up causing, like, an unattended effect.
Speaker 1:Right? Where it's like Yeah. Oh, they didn't proofread it. It hallucinated, and now it's illegal to drink that White House on Wednesday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Carry
Speaker 2:out the or I
Speaker 1:I I think that's probably an unlikely. Gotta sign off on it. There was a follow-up on, on the Curtis Yarvin thing that we talked about. Dworkesh Patel chimes in, and he says, Curtis Yarvin is mistaken when he says that Apple can produce iPhones because it's a monarchy. There are millions of firms, monarchies in the world, that can't produce anything nearly as impressive as iPhones from the laundromat down the street to Boeing.
Speaker 1:Apple is the result of a decades long evolutionary process facilitated by the market, which uplifts the very best culture, talent, processes, and ideas in the entire world. And the moment Apple slips, it'll get replaced. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 15 years. And I think Curtis would actually be like, awesome. Like, I love the idea of, like, millions of little, like, micro, techno monitors or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, this is still an interesting, take. He says governments won't just, don't just don't work this way. Xi Jinping isn't competing against a 1000000 counterfactual Chinese leaders who didn't do 0 COVID, avoided deflation, didn't kill the tech industry, and were awake to AGI. He can he can fuck up as much as he wants.
Speaker 1:If a monarch happens to be competent like Lee Kuan Yew, it is merely by chance not due to some intrinsic selection mechanism of monarchy that we can't that we can replicate. You are just as likely to get brutal dictators like Mao and Stalin by chance. This is not a reasonable gamble to take, with the lives of 100 of millions of citizens. Apple is indeed a wonderfully comp competent organization. If we want more of the world to be run competently, we should delegate more functions to the market.
Speaker 1:Cool. Which is constantly and ruthlessly sizing down incompetence. To be clear, a ton of incompetent businesses exist, but they lose access to capital, talent, and power rapidly, which is reallocated to those who can deliver. They don't drag down the fortunes of entire countries and kill millions of people, which has happened again and again in authoritarian systems. So I think it's a good it's a good point.
Speaker 1:There was actually a rebuttal to this, which I don't know if we printed, but, there was a there was a rebuttal that that that said that, this that there is a difference between the Mao and Stalin outcome and the Lee Kuan Yew outcome. And it's and it's whether or not the dictator has, control over not just the capital flows, but the actual capital stock. And so the idea is that if if if the Yavinite monarch owns, you know, 60% of the wealth, then there is economic alignment between them and their people, and it will be, like, a better outcome. I didn't really dig into it too much. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but but it did it did take me down. I I I'm, like, I'm, like, only tangentially interested in this battle, but I think it is interesting that that Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't I don't feel qualified to,
Speaker 1:but it did take me down a very interesting rabbit hole, which was, I was like, okay. So this guy's arguing that if if the monarch if the authoritarian leader, Lee Kuan Yew or Mao, own a lot of the wealth in the country, you will get a good outcome. And so immediately that demands a fact check. Like, how much money did Lee Kuan Yew have? And I tried to look it up, and it's completely unknown.
Speaker 1:I I I found I found, like, wildly different different stats. Somebody was running the numbers and being like, well, he made a $1,000,000 a year. So if he saved it all and invested, he'd have, like, 60,000,000, but total wealth in the country was in, like, the tens of 1,000,000,000. And then another another quote was like, no. Like, he the the he changed some law so that you couldn't see his wealth, and he actually died with, like, 5,000,000,000 and it was actually, like, 10%.
Speaker 1:So, like, maybe it's true. Crazy. But it was one of these things where, maybe maybe a listener knows more here or something and can write in, but, it was just one of these. And and I see this a lot with when we dig into, like, Asian companies and and and, like, Chinese companies. We're thinking about, doing a whole deep dive on DJI, and it's very hard because there aren't there aren't that many accounts.
Speaker 1:And you
Speaker 2:don't know what you can trust.
Speaker 1:You don't know what you can trust, and then, also, stuff doesn't get translated that often, doesn't make it out past the very firewall that often. And so, it's just a great mystery. So if you have an idea of what Lee Kuan Yew is actually worth, that's more of an interesting story to me than, you know, this this YARVIN debate. I more just wanna know more about, Lee Kuan Yew because clearly something happened great in Singapore because it turned into a great country from basically nothing. And whatever the whatever the seeds of success were, those are worth studying.
Speaker 1:And I thought that was interesting. We we already talked about this breaking news. Oh, let's go to Ross Ulbricht. So FreeRoss announced that Ross was just granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are.
Speaker 1:I guess this account has been advocating for the pardon of, Ross Ulbricht, who was the dread pirate Robert who ran the Silk Road in what was that? 2,000 2013, I think he went to jail, but it was like that era.
Speaker 2:Only really running the Silk Road for a few years. Few years.
Speaker 1:And so Luke Metro says, all crime is now legal assuming you do it with crypto. Some truth to that, but
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the positioning of being like, okay. If somebody was operating effectively a DoorDash for drugs Yeah. Using using fiat rails. Yep.
Speaker 2:They would have been slammed for so many things in so many ways. But Ross having these more arms length Yep. You know, creating a platform to facilitate these transactions, but being able to say, like, well, it's it's just a forum.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yep.
Speaker 2:I don't understand. I think there was just a lot going on behind the scenes here. Libertarian movement. Totalitarian movement support for Trump.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That that led to this. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is a To to Ross's family by one person is like, this is an olive branch to the libertarians. Yeah. So you you do this, and then there's gonna be a lot of tariffs and non libertarian stuff that goes on, but they got their guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And libertarians would argue that people are gonna buy drugs all the time. Yep. And if you create a marketplace for it where sellers want to have trusted reputations that will sell better drugs and people will have less overdoses or things like that.
Speaker 2:But then there was also, like, murder for hire on the Silk Road. I'm sure. You know? And and and so I don't I know I didn't understand this, but but purely from a marketing standpoint, the Ross family led a phenomenal marketing campaign to reposition the guy as somebody who wasn't the largest drug like, a drug trafficker. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically. Like, as a digital
Speaker 1:drug trafficker. The other thing that was really big was, like, you could you could buy hit men on the silk road.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:Whereas they're hiring.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so so it's not just
Speaker 1:even and and even by libertarian standards, like, the non aggression principles kind of violated there. It's a little bit tricky. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it's almost like and so going back to Luke's point, it's it's Trump has set a precedent around okay. He launched, like, what's effectively, like, you know, it's not a security meme coins aren't securities, but, you know, he launched it here in America. It's unclear.
Speaker 1:I do hope that, we get to hear Ross, you know, plead his case on heroin or something. Podcast.
Speaker 2:People were posting yesterday, like, wow. Poor Ross. He's been sentenced to 40 years doing the Libertarian podcast, Stuart.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So well, let's move on from, you know, a a a drug platform to, you know, instead of buying drugs, you should buy something much more much more much more of a drug, which is a fine watch.
Speaker 1:Let's do a promoted post.
Speaker 2:Let's do a promoted post.
Speaker 1:One of the greatest drugs in the world, consumption.
Speaker 2:This is yeah. There there's nothing that hits quite like it. So this is an amazing account, first of all. It is atbot 316-76934, sharing a bunch of Japanese and and Mandarin, which I actually you know, we don't have the translation here. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But I can translate this for you. This is a picture of Brad Pitt wearing a 222 Vacheron Constantin. And this watch, which they just reintroduced. Yes. And and we're calling it now.
Speaker 2:We've been calling this in the group chat 2 months. Vacheron is about to go on a generational run.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You've got Patek, which is just launching slop remixes of the Nautilus. You've got, you know, AP, which is going more of the Yeah. Louis Vuitton type beast y route. And all those all those DJ partnerships, whatever. Vacheron coming in.
Speaker 2:Yep. 3rd member of the holy trinity dropping, you know, this this I I Just class. We each need this watch. You do. We should crisp q four Christmas gifts for each other so it's zeroes out.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Engrave the back. And, anyways. Yeah. So how do you work on?
Speaker 2:Great campaign and a great watch. And you can get, these are, I think, going out through the boutiques now. But if you want to get a vintage Vacheron, 222, you can go to get bezel.com.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or maybe you want a, maybe you want it overseas or something else that fits your style. Because even though I highly recommend this particular model, I always say that it depends on, you know
Speaker 2:There's so many things that go into it.
Speaker 1:What wears best for you.
Speaker 2:So what wears best for you? Shoot us a DM. We're happy to go back and forth on it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Happy to help with that. Let's go to Chad Byers. He says, Gen z AI founders are insanely cracked, 10 x more business savvy than young people a decade ago.
Speaker 1:And this is this is an interesting, dividend, I think, from, like, the Wi Fi money crowd and just all the chaos of COVID and being inside and and watching meme stocks happen, watching crypto happen, and having so many opportunities. Like, I I I think, you know, in our generation, there were, you know, teenage young teenagers who made money online, but it was and Jeremy Gaffan has that has that saying about high school transcript and a Stripe account, and I'm investing. Stripe account showing that you made money when you were still in high school. But Yeah. Usually it was like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Somebody was like got a T shirt business going, or I know someone who's had a stock photo site that did pretty well. Yeah. That's not for 1,000,000
Speaker 2:of dollars. Like, there's so many way
Speaker 1:to flipping.
Speaker 2:So many way to just make,
Speaker 1:like, $10, a $100. Yeah. If your high school is
Speaker 2:Think about this. Think about in high school, like, let's say, like, middle school specifically. $200 in middle school was, like, I would get my dad would pay me, like, $3 a lawn. Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, $200 is, like, literally, like Oh, yeah. It was different. I'm like
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Mowing a lawn for, like, 2 years in a row or whatever. Yeah. And now you can just go, and when Nike drops the sneaker, go lever up, get $200 from your parents, buy the sneaker, and immediately you can resell it on StockX for double. And then you just made $200. Like, I know
Speaker 1:I know a kid that did exactly that. And then he started writing a bot that did it, and then he sold that bot. And it's like, it's great. And and those types of I think there's basically the opportunity for really young people to make make make more money just bigger than ever. And what that means in terms of business savvy is specifically, like, you get to a certain point, you're gonna have to learn about taxes, lawyers.
Speaker 1:Like, these things are gonna come in, and that's gonna teach you more about business. Yeah. Let's do another promoted post, and then we'll go to this, Andrea post. Do you have the promoted post there?
Speaker 2:I've got a promoted post.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, let's do it. So 2 brothers on the show, Chris, Amadan, and Will, who doesn't put his last name in his handle, so I never remember what it is. But they are building a let me let me scroll up here. Okay.
Speaker 2:So I just get it right. A young boy, u AUV, defense tech company, is how Will described it, which sounds exciting to me, but they're basically building, autonomous, like boats, drones, and so they're hiring an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. Sure. So these are like founding team level roles. Job.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So basically, this is an opportunity if you're an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer to go join a founding team
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is building, some like, imagine, like, the the the, imagine, like, the lifestyle of, like, building, like, RC boats. Yeah. But they have, like, guns on them. And, like, they can blow up and stuff like that. So anyways, you can go to, they have a they have a, something listed on on Ashby.
Speaker 2:Amazon Heavy Industries on Ashby. There's 7 open roles. They are funded. They're hiring some interns as well, so go check them out. Support the brothers.
Speaker 2:And, these guys are avid listeners of the show, former reply guys of the week. So even if you're not the mechanical engineer or the electrical engineer that that would join, their company, tell tell a friend. Brothers, supporting brother, that's brother behavior. Back to you, John.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Andrea. Did you follow this story at all? She says, Meta isn't making anyone follow VP or POTUS accounts on Instagram. If you were following it, it just transitioned like it's done on Twitter. It's crazy that people can't even deduce that because we've stopped thinking and just react.
Speaker 1:So, basically, yesterday or during inauguration, as soon as, I think, Trump's hand got off the bible, the people at Meta changed the account over just like they changed the White House website over. And so all of a sudden, if you were following the the at VP account, it was Kamala Harris' content and her profile picture, and then boom. It's JD Vance, his name, his pictures, and his profile picture. And same thing for POTUS. And so a bunch of people who love Kamala were like, why am I following JD Vance now?
Speaker 1:And they and they got confused. They got confused. But what's so so it became this whole meme about, like, Zuck is pro Trump, so he made everyone he made my Instagram account follow Trump, but you're not following the Trump account
Speaker 2:he did for POTUS.
Speaker 1:But it gets more complicated. So because the changeover from Trump and Vance from Biden and Kamala was so contentious. Like, when you think about most VPs, it's like, who really was, like, up in arms? Like, oh, yeah. I'm a really, like, Mike Pence guy, so I'm, like, super upset about Kamala.
Speaker 1:Like like, the the previous changeovers have not been as big, and the accounts were probably way smaller because Instagram's just bigger. And so what what happened at Meta was millions and millions of people saw this and were, like, oh, I I'm following the wrong person.
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna be clear.
Speaker 1:Unfollow. And what happened was the unfollow demand was so high that the unfollow requests weren't going through on the server side. So then it looked like I unfollowed it, and then I was like, cool. I unfollowed it because it updated on the front end. It didn't update on the back end, and then you're still following it and does look like it, but it's both.
Speaker 2:So if you were following Joe Biden because you love Joe Biden Yeah. And then you start getting served Trump.
Speaker 1:It's a terrible system. It makes no sense. They just shouldn't have at POTUS or at VP. It should just be Redirect. Trump or Biden.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something like that. But they they actually do some sort of archive where if you're following at VP when it's Kamala, you will get you will get automatically you do automatically follow at VP number 47 or 46, and then it's an archive of Kamala's content or something like that. But it's all this, like, weird technical infrastructure, and I think that there was also a bug going on because a lot of people clicked the unfollow button and then refollowed them, and then they felt like it
Speaker 2:was Being the being the team at any social media platform that's in charge of switching over presidential handles. So, yeah, I get terrible
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Job off the war rooms.
Speaker 1:Let's do another promoted post.
Speaker 2:Caught me caught me lacking.
Speaker 1:Well, well, here. I'll do a bucket poll. Talk about that. A bucket poll? Can you
Speaker 2:do a bucket poll? Because I got pull up.
Speaker 1:I got one. I got I got a couple here. This is funny from the technology brother, clearly inspired by us. Just kidding. I think they have that, that handle going earlier.
Speaker 1:It says George Poros, and he shows the the net worth of Elon Musk is 415,000,000,000 and the net worth of George Soros is 7,000,000,000. What has been going on with George Soros in his business career? I feel like he's been hovering around a couple billion, like, my entire life.
Speaker 2:I think he's got way more, and he just
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Okay. He just doesn't show off guys. Whereas whereas Elon's wealth, it's like getting mark to market constantly, so it's hard to tell. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, like, the the political donation stuff, it's always shocking me how I mean, SBF actually, like, brought this up, which was that, like, everyone was praising Elon in from from the Republican party for donating a quarter of a $1,000,000,000. And they were like, it's the biggest, most insane donation. Like, he did it for us. And it is a lot of money, but it's, like, less than 1% of his wealth. It's less than 0.1% of his wealth.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, like, very, very small. And so I think, especially Soros has been, I think, focused on, like, local courts and local stuff. And and in some of those, it's like it's like a $10,000 check will change the course of
Speaker 2:the election locally or something. Yeah. It's it's crazy. Yeah. I I, but it is funny.
Speaker 2:Again, I shouldn't talk about I shouldn't talk about Politics. Politics that I get when I go on a rampage. But I do have a promoted post. Very exciting news. If you were following our account Yep.
Speaker 2:This morning, you would have seen us request a new feature from Ram. Oh. We've got so much cash coming in that we wanted a place to actually earn some type of because just sitting here, it's not earning
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Earning anything at all other than adding to the general ambiance of the show and just being close to cash is like, you there's some energy transfer. Yes. It's nice. But we requested a feature this morning at like 6 AM, something like that. Ramp actually shipped it Really?
Speaker 2:Couple hours later. And that feature was treasury Fantastic. To Eric, their wonderful CEO and friend of ours says if you're reading this, your business is probably earning 0.07% on operating cash. Ramp is now offering 2 a half percent. That's 35 times national average and much more on investment accounts, and you can switch in a minute.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So they're offering this functionality where you can have, historically, treasury products, you know, would offer a high rate, have low liquidity, so it could take, and it was sort of designed intentionally in a way where they were like, well, we want you to keep your money in this operating account that's earning nothing. Yep. But, like, yeah, we have a high interest product and then they make it inconvenient enough to move between the 2. So ramps coming in with a with a high yield, high liquidity, or, you know, quick liquidity product.
Speaker 2:And I love this copy. You guys legally, we can't call it free money, but you can. So, go check it out. We'll get some free money and go get some free money.
Speaker 1:So if you're on ramp or you're
Speaker 2:I don't actually think we can I don't think we can say probably not? We we also can't call it free money. You can. You can.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if your company is on ramp or or your or or or you have a ramp card in your organization, tell them check this feature out because it's fantastic. Big big week for ramp generally. Did you see all the promotions? Will Petrie is now the CFO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We're not really set up
Speaker 1:to do
Speaker 2:the the Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're we we gotta do
Speaker 2:a whole personnel news. Do a personnel news where we're on the beach. Yeah. Like, some type of, like, all weather gear, like, yelling at the mic. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's super windy right now. You can be like,
Speaker 1:breaking news. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, fantastic team over there and, great to see the promotions go out. Let's go to low yield, Lucy. I I love this post.
Speaker 1:This is so good. Flirt with a guy at the bar, ask for his phone to put your number in, open Coinbase, place a large limit order for a illiquid meme coin you're holding. Now you have volume to sell into.
Speaker 2:I just I just shared that. I thought that's
Speaker 1:so much money.
Speaker 2:I mean, that that that genuinely would work with with with A lot of SF guys. So many. SF guys, New York guys, Miami guys, definitely. Miami. Because the girl comes up to you and says they have, like, the next hot meme coin.
Speaker 2:That's not what she's saying.
Speaker 1:She's saying make the guy think that you're putting your phone number in and instead buy another meme coin.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that this is I also see it. I also think it would work to just be like, you have to buy this. Like, I probably see because they're gonna wanna the guys are gonna wanna flex and be Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Just threw 25 k and
Speaker 1:And you do this thing. Exactly. And then you go to the bathroom and you sell. Immediately. Buy me a drink?
Speaker 1:No. Buy drink coin. I bet. It's the lowest volume coin on pumped out fun right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Ridiculous. It's great. Let's see if there's another good book bucket pull in here. It's a good one from Max Bow. Is sending Factorio to your competitors' engineers a cost effective means of sabotage?
Speaker 1:And it's a screenshot of you've received a gift copy of the game Factorio on stream. So I don't know if you've played Factorio. I I never have. I've seen a little clips of it. It's like I mean, there's, like, a whole, like, age of empires, then there's civilization.
Speaker 2:StarCraft, which is
Speaker 1:Yeah. StarCraft, you know, I think a game lasts, like, an hour. Factorio, I think it's, like, days days days building this, like, insane complicated factory and highly addictive and highly loved by engineers. It became a big meme, like, a a a while back, but, I I I can't get into that stuff anymore. It's it's too too too much.
Speaker 1:We already did this one. Let's see what else we got here. Okay. Oh, this is an interesting one here. Do you know anything about Quest Nutrition?
Speaker 1:So Tom Bilyeu posts, we turned $10,000 into a $1,000,000,000 in 5 years. Here's what I learned from my journey to a $1,000,000,000 exit. And Max is questioning this by quote tweeting it and says, no idea what the nonarm's length transaction was in the early days of Quest, but no CPGs no CPG company was started with $10,000. So he's kind of like
Speaker 2:It's quite though not true, though. Yeah. I just like I just I just I just need so much trouble
Speaker 1:to start a company with 10 There's
Speaker 2:so many counterexamples
Speaker 1:and Yeah.
Speaker 2:And ways. And and
Speaker 1:I mean, you did certainly we we we had, we had a 100 and 7. You might see.
Speaker 2:Start a company with 10 ks.
Speaker 1:And then immediately raise more. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. You could just do a pitch.
Speaker 2:I don't like positioning it as like it's impossible to start
Speaker 1:a company with. Hey, if
Speaker 2:you would hold. I'll say if you only have $10 to invest in a company. Yeah. You know.
Speaker 1:PMF or die is gonna be 25 k. That's probably 10 k by inflation
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Based on when when he started that company. So I don't know. I I I get the I get the point that, like, when people do those threads of, like, I turn 10 k No.
Speaker 2:It's a
Speaker 1:little like, probably there's a little bit of fuzzing and exaggeration on either side. But,
Speaker 2:I think it's directionally correct. Needed less money to start. A 100%. A 100%. Like, you can use AI
Speaker 1:Stripe out.
Speaker 2:Generate product images. Yeah. Offer it as a preorder. Yep. If you sell it, use your money to manufacture it.
Speaker 1:Go viral on TikTok or get one corporate deal or call it.
Speaker 2:Even like beverage, which is the most capital intensive thing. If you're smart and you find the right co packer manufacturer, you could get them to for 10 grand Yep. To manufacture like a A pilot run.
Speaker 1:For sure. Or amazing financing terms. And you could do some sort of crowdfunding campaign where you pre sell the product, and then you're getting that cash up front because you're charging it on Stripe. So that reconciles in, like, 3 days, and then you have to pay your manufacturer for net ninety if they're cool. Like, it's all just the art of the deal, baby.
Speaker 1:The art of the deal.
Speaker 2:Always has
Speaker 1:this is, let's go to Rune 1. He says, they're worried about ethnic nepotism when they should be worried about boys' group chat nepotism.
Speaker 2:This is extremely real.
Speaker 1:Definitely, I I mean, also, I bet Ruiz is in, like, a 1,000,000 group chats. So he's like
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you are adding him in just just the show sure. And then just being like, hey. Could I get a repost, please?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the real group chat nepotism. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Of the timeline. When you see something go out and it's The only thing we know 25 people retweeted this in the first 3 minutes. What's going on here?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the
Speaker 1:group chat nepotism going on. Yeah. The real alpha. Yeah. What you got from me on the promoted side, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I got a promoted post from none other than Cohiba Cigars. Fantastic. Shade above the rest. Cohiba, Connecticut story is one of breaking expectations where most people think of Connecticut cigars as smooth but simple. We've gone above and beyond to craft the cigar that breaks the mold.
Speaker 2:So, anyways, great looking picture here. Fantastic. Go grab, if you're celebrating something, go grab a Cohiba. Don't inhale. Just a couple of thoughts.
Speaker 1:And don't do it often. But it's a great it's a great excuse to get together with the the men of your family. I have I have this family tradition.
Speaker 2:Have a beautiful I
Speaker 1:have this family tradition of anytime any man in the family has a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving, all the men in the family smoke cigars? Sir.
Speaker 2:Getting up there.
Speaker 1:But but it's a great it's a great excuse to just, like, get all the guys together and just hang out and talk. And sometimes people don't even smoke them, but it's fine.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:just like it's an excuse to just go and do something with, like, all the guys in the family. Yeah. It's just yeah. It's it's great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I'm a I'm a big, believer in, like, the barbell strategy when it comes to nicotine consumption. It's like Yeah. The the cleanest tobacco free products most of the time, but every once in a while, once a quarter, the pure tobacco. Everyone that you don't wanna be doing daily.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's good. Should we go to another post? Yeah. Let let's talk about Davos.
Speaker 2:Let's talk about Davos. I think We turned it down this year Yeah. For many.
Speaker 1:But I think that I think that next year, we could make Davos cool again. I think that we have what it takes.
Speaker 2:It's too iconic. Yeah. It's too charged. It's a great opportunity.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's go to Wasteland Capital. He says, Davos is absolutely dead this year. No one gives an f. I'm not swearing anymore.
Speaker 1:We got some feedback from a very important listener that, use it. This needs to be family friendly. You need to be able to listen to Technology Brothers with your kids in the car. This is a pronatalism podcast. And so the kids must be able to listen to the hot takes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Supposedly Imagine yeah.
Speaker 2:Like, imagine if you listen to 10 hours a week of of this show with your kids, you know, in the car or in the kitchen, you know, around the house, they will be trained on some of the hottest takes in tech from such a young age Yes. That they will be earning potentially more money than you just from x payouts by the time they're 10 years old. Yeah. You know, give them an iPad. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's only one app on it. Yeah. Connect a Stripe account to their x. Yeah. And they will be, you know, putting bread.
Speaker 1:But they shouldn't need to develop a potty mouth for that. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Supposedly, luxury call girl, I immediately go into something and say, ruder, but it's not a bad word and it's a real thing.
Speaker 1:And I think, you know, we we we we we gotta talk about it here. So supposedly luxury call girl business
Speaker 2:Promoting cigars. Promoting cigars.
Speaker 1:Both of you.
Speaker 2:Cojiva Cigars talking about call call girls, but we promise
Speaker 1:we will never
Speaker 2:swear again.
Speaker 1:Because he those are age gated. You're gonna be 21 plus to buy tobacco products in America. Anyone can start swearing, but not if you listen to the show.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Clean it up out there. Swearing is out of timeline. Swearing is out. It's dead. We killed it.
Speaker 1:RIP. The last episode was the date that it died. Supposedly, the electroly cargo business is down, 60% on last year. Vibes similar to the last meeting of the Soviets in 1999 in 1991. German chancellor Olaf Scholz addresses a half empty congress hall at the World Economic 20, World Economic Forum 25 in Davos.
Speaker 1:My colleague even managed to secure a seat in the front row.
Speaker 2:Kinda threw his colleague under the bus there. His colleague wasn't already gonna be in the, you know, front row. He should
Speaker 1:Oh, that or or
Speaker 2:My colleagues
Speaker 1:and Yeah.
Speaker 2:My colleague was like, oh, I'm
Speaker 1:dumb enough to go to Dallas. Yeah. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What? That's that's.
Speaker 1:I think we got to take it over. I think we had to go and just
Speaker 2:make it a
Speaker 1:barn burner speech.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have actually a may we're speaking on the main stage of a major technology conference.
Speaker 1:I mean, Davos is the next one in the in Sun Valley.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We we gotta manifest this. So, if your dad runs Davos, tell them to hire us. Or if you're, you know, who who's the guy behind it? Is it Olaf Scholz? If you're listening, give us a call.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need to do a hostile takeover of the World Economic Forum.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to Flo Crivello Crivello. I don't know how to pronounce that. Ultimoar says, I wouldn't be surprised if law firms had started seeing the impact of AI on their bottom lines, especially those serving startups. I probably send 40% of the tasks I used to send to our lawyers to Claude now, and I and only escalate the most important matters.
Speaker 1:I have no idea we should talk to a lawyer and see if this is true. I
Speaker 2:I think part of it is, like, law firms are cyclical Yeah. But there's such a ridiculous number of new company formation right now Sure. And and massive investment Yep. That they're probably not seeing it yet. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep. Because a lot of these law firms too have these big staffing issues where Yeah. In 20 20 3, they were, like, letting go, you know, cutting 10%. Yep. 10%.
Speaker 2:They had way too many people. Yep. And then this last year, presumably, like, they've had the opposite problem of being understaffed. Yep. So I don't know.
Speaker 1:I I I don't know that there's that many big law firms that cater to startups specifically. It's usually like they have a huge corporate practice, and then they have their startup arm Division. On the side, like their division. And sometimes it can be very illustrious and very cool, and it can be a profit center if they're taking equity and warrants and stuff. But in general, it seems like I I I I don't think any of them are fully pegged to to start on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the interesting thing is is this I'm sure this will like, I'm waiting for some like, I haven't seen a a rapper that is saying we are this we are a consumer product specifically to generate, like, corporate legal docs. I'm sure there's a bunch out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Harvey sells into law firms.
Speaker 2:They sell into
Speaker 1:law firms. Capture and I'm guessing it's probably on the law firms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So you can't think of the the consumer version Yeah. Harvey.
Speaker 1:And so it's like
Speaker 2:be SMB version, but they're I'm sure they're out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There there is a world where the law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries, But of the 60% that they're still getting, those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI.
Speaker 2:Like yeah.
Speaker 1:And so that that balance of where the value accrues is still
Speaker 2:And there's there was always the YC's had a bunch of different, you know, they have financing docs on their website. I'm sure they have other docs, and and there's always been these templates available. But now it's just it feels different when you
Speaker 1:Totally. Generate it. Totally. I'm I'm I'm itching for another promoted post. I see you got some good stuff there.
Speaker 2:Let's do we got a promoted post out with us one because it's great. Our friends at RM Sotheby's say for sale, 2006 Mercedes Benz SLR McLaren edition. This thing, the golden age of AMG. Yeah. This thing just looks, incredible.
Speaker 2:The the just like the entire front of this car is just so Yeah. Iconic. And it's it's funny because these cars these cars, they they they They pop. They do fly under the radar Yep. Still.
Speaker 2:And so it's kind of a cool car for like a first date where you don't want your date to know that you're just Yep. You know, a a decamillionaire. And you just wanna you want them to be like, oh, this is just a normal guy. Let's Take the Benz. He just yeah.
Speaker 2:He's a super nice guy. Like, drives an old Mercedes, but, like, you know, seems to have a good job. Good head on his shoulders. The doors were weird. His car date, Aventador SVJ.
Speaker 2:There he is though. If it goes first one goes well, bring out the SVJ. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, great first date car right here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's fantastic. Didn't do well, I think, because, isn't it isn't it an automatic? I'm pretty sure there's like, the purest? The the purest so it didn't pop like the carrera GT.
Speaker 1:I mean, it came out around the same time, and the carrera GT and the and the and the f forty both went wild, but this one kinda got left behind. I mean,
Speaker 2:mer Mercedes, they have the I
Speaker 1:mean, now the MG one's gonna be a big one. But Yeah. They never they never really had the halo car.
Speaker 2:It will never be it will never be that culturally impactful because they're not making enough of them. Like, I think I think to have, like, for Mercedes to be relevant in the sports car market Totally. Yeah. Need to have.
Speaker 1:They need a 911.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the g and the, g two is not do it. No. Really that? Like, it it costs Yeah.
Speaker 2:I I would when I was, like, getting my last car, I seriously considered the the g t. Yep. I they denied my request for metallic brown at the factory in Germany. I, like, really wanted metallic brown, black wheels, red red calipers. Okay.
Speaker 2:And they don't do any custom colors. Interesting. Even though I had a buying history with the the dealership, they were just like, we're not doing colors.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:was like, okay. I'm gonna get a turbo.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. Well, we have a great post to end on. Michael says, I'd rather get bucket pulled on the pod than get into y c, and I really wanna get into y c. Well, Michael, we got some good news for you.
Speaker 1:Did you didn't even get bucket pulled.
Speaker 2:It's a certified banger. Certified banger. Printed on 8 and a half Canadian himself.
Speaker 1:8 and a half by 11 inch paper for you. You're officially on the show. You're getting the follow back
Speaker 2:from
Speaker 1:the TV account. Thank you for writing in. And a fantastic profile picture from Office Space. Classic movie. Good reference.
Speaker 2:Anyway, the only word of advice, Michael, use your full name, use a real picture, build the brand.
Speaker 1:Or if you're gonna go full and on, just make it quiet Canadian up top, quiet Canadian below. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's just easier for All or nothing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we'll and we should dictate the aesthetics of x now.
Speaker 2:It's a it's a I don't like the feeling of knowing someone's first name, but not their last name. Yep. Rather just have
Speaker 1:it be one foot out. Are you in a nun or not? Yeah. Pick a side.
Speaker 2:Because if I go on the LinkedIn if I go on LinkedIn right now and, like, this guy wants to get into YC. Yep. Maybe he's a fit for PMF or DIVE. Yep. Oh, I'm gonna just search Michael.
Speaker 2:I feel like there's there's also a few other people up there
Speaker 1:named Michael. But thanks for coming. Thanks for yeah. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for watching.
Speaker 1:And please go and leave us 5 star reviews. And don't forget to put a really long ad read.
Speaker 2:If you if you put a review for the show and don't include an ad, we're gonna report it to
Speaker 1:Oh, and there's a new for the people that made it this far, there's a new challenge for you. We're thinking about retooling the reply guy of the week program to be the sales development reply guy of the week award.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And in order to win the SDR of the week award, in your replies, we're gonna encourage you to sell some ad space. Yeah. So, you know, whatever you think, if you just like the post, oh, this is good, or you have something else to chime in with. Crying emoji. Fortunately, x has no limit on characters now.
Speaker 1:So you can you can say what you want. You know, we'll laugh. We'll like it. We might retweet it if it's good stuff good reply.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But then tab tab tab enter enter enter. Boom. This reply is brought to you by my company. We are the best AI SDR company.
Speaker 1:Here. Go here. Throw the link in there. Do whatever you want. Go wild with it.
Speaker 2:Go wild. Ads everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yes. Ads everywhere. So give it a try.
Speaker 2:Run too many ads.
Speaker 1:We look forward to seeing you on the timeline. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:Have a good evening.
Speaker 1:The end.